The People's Record

An Indonesian court has ruled indigenous people have the right to manage forests where they live, a move which supporters said prevents the government from handing over community-run land to businesses.
May 17, 2013

Disputes between indigenous groups and companies have become increasingly tense in recent years, as soaring global demand for commodities like palm oil has seen plantations encroach on forests. In Thursday’s ruling, Constitutional Court judges said that a 1999 law should be changed so it no longer defines forest that has been inhabited by indigenous groups for generations as “state forest”, according to court documents.

“Indigenous Indonesians have the right to log their forests and cultivate the land for their personal needs, and the needs of their families,” judge Muhammad Alim said as he handed down the ruling, state news agency Antara reported.

While environmentalists welcomed the ruling, they warned it could unintentionally lead to an upsurge in disputes between authorities and communities over the classification of indigenous land. In March, seven villagers were shot in northern Sumatra, where a dispute over a forest claimed by both the community and government has been simmering since 1998.

The National People’s Indigenous Organisation filed the challenge to the 1999 law, which has let officials sell permits allowing palm oil, paper, mining and timber companies to exploit their land. The group said Friday’s ruling affected 40 million hectares (98 million acres) of forest - slightly larger than Japan, and 30 per cent of Indonesia’s forest coverage. Despite their living there, the area was legally classified as “customary forest”, a term that describes forests that have been inhabited by indigenous people for a long time.

“About 40 million indigenous people are now the rightful owners of our customary forests,” said the group’s chief Abdon Nababan.

Stepi Hakim, Indonesia director of the Clinton Climate Initiative, said the ruling would give legal grounds for indigenous communities to challenge businesses operating in their forests, but this could lead to a string of new disputes. “As soon as this policy is delivered, local governments have to be ready to mitigate conflicts,” he said.

Source

Indigenous activists stage new protest at Amazon dam site
May 7, 2013

Some 200 indigenous activists and fishermen have been occupying the main construction site at Brazil’s controversial Belo Monte dam in the Amazon and are demanding government involvement in the negotiations. “We want to be heard. We want a close representative of President Dilma Rousseff to come and see us,” chief Valdemir Munduruku, one of the leaders of the occupation, told AFP by telephone Monday.

Five indigenous tribes are calling for legislation under which they would have to be consulted prior to any official decision affecting them with respect to the dam’s construction. “They should consult us but instead they are sending the police and soldiers. They are denying access to our lawyer,” the chief said.

A press spokeswoman for the Norte Energia consortium in charge of the dam’s construction in northern Para state confirmed the occupation Monday. “Work has stopped on the main site, where most of the turbines will be set up,” she said from Brasilia, adding that the protesters’ demands had been forwarded to federal authorities.

Six thousand workers have been idle for the past five days and Friday some 80 police arrived to protect the site. “Today we are going to leave the site to give a press conference and release a letter with our demands,” chief Munduruku said.

“You are pointing your weapons at our heads. Your soldiers and war trucks are besieging our lands. You are eliminating our fish,” said an excerpt from the letter. “What we want is simple. You must implement the law on prior consultation of indigenous people,” the letter concluded.

Protesters have accused Norte Energia of backtracking on accords signed in June after 150 indigenous people occupied the Pimental area for three weeks.

They are outraged because fishing in the area is no longer possible and there is no drinking water.

Belo Monte, which is being built at a cost of $13 billion, is expected to flood an area of 500 square kilometers (200 square miles) along the Xingu River, displacing 16,000 people, according to the government. Some NGOs have estimated that some 40,000 people would be displaced by the massive project.

Indigenous groups have made clear that the dam will harm their way of life while environmentalists (many of whom are indigenous people) warn of deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions and irreparable damage to the ecosystem.

The federal government plans to invest a total of $1.2 billion to assist the displaced by the time the dam is completed in 2019. The first turbine is set to begin operating in 2015 and the last one in 2019.

The native peoples want their lands demarcated and non-indigenous people removed from them. They also are demanding better health care and access to drinking water.

Source

First Nations community, cut off from transport & trampled on for Winnipeg’s freshwater
March 29, 2013

Health worker Linda Redsky sits at her kitchen table, remembering when she almost drowned bringing groceries back from the market. With no roads to her community in western Ontario, she had to walk across the frozen surface of Shoal Lake, a sprawling body of water just north of the Canada-United States border.

She and her husband Wyne were walking back to their home on the lakeshore when they heard loud cracks all around them. “I went completely under the ice,” she says, her voice trembling. “I remember looking up and it was like a moment of clarity. I could see the hole I’d fallen through, I could see stars in the sky and I was sinking.”

But Wyne grabbed her hand and pulled her to safety. They kept each other warm until help came, and it wasn’t the first time that the couple had rescued each other. “At times like that I hate living here,” said Redsky. “It’s beautiful in summer, but I hate those trips across the ice.”

The Redskys live in an indigenous First Nation community, known as Shoal Lake 40. Though they’re just a dozen kilometres from the Trans-Canada highway and a few hours’ drive from a major city, their community had been cut off from Canada’s transport network for 100 years.

This isolation has been part of a long-running dispute that many First Nations people believe is emblematic of their troubled relations with the Canadian state.

In 1913, the city of Winnipeg - about 180km to the west - got the Canadian government to evict the people of Shoal Lake from their lakeside village so they could build a fresh water intake for a growing urban population. Then the city dug a canal to keep the water clean. That canal turned the new Shoal Lake settlement into an island, cutting off the inhabitants from the forests, trade routes, roads and railroad lines all around them.

“We were blockaded,” said the elected chief of Shoal Lake, Erwin Redsky. “It’s manmade isolation. We’re not really remote. We can hear the traffic on the Trans-Canada [highway] and hear the trains go by.” In January, that isolation came to a temporary end with the opening of what Chief Redsky calls “Freedom Road”. Only open in winter, the road crosses a steel bridge that Chief Redsky demanded for years to end his community’s reliance on the often-dangerous ice crossing over Shoal Lake.

“To us it’s freedom, at least for now and until we build a permanent link. No more danger when the ice is thin,” he says. “People have been just driving on the road for no reason, just to see what it’s like.”

But Shoal Lake’s problems are far from over. There are few jobs and even the lake’s abundant fish and mineral-bearing rocks can’t be exploited, because of the City of Winnipeg’s insistence that no development take place near the source of its drinking water. Once-vibrant gold mines and commercial fishing have closed.

Now Winnipeg has big plans for its century-old water supply. A project to install central Canada’s largest inland port and a proposal to sell Shoal Lake Water to surrounding municipalities has given Chief Redsky an opportunity to call attention to his community’s plight. He and his fellow councillors have opposed the use of Shoal Lake water in these new schemes and have managed to get them delayed, if not stopped.

Treaties between the British colonial government and Canada’s First Nations explicitly allot water rights to aboriginal communities, and Chief Redsky intends to press that claim in the courts and international tribunals if necessary.

“Water is sacred to us, to all life, and our treaties call for the water to be shared. So why is only one community - Winnipeg - benefitting from this resource and not all of us?” the chief asks. “We’ll do what it takes to share this benefit.”

Shoal Lake people, he points out, have to drink bottled water because they have no purification plant.

The City of Winnipeg isn’t commenting on the case while the legal ramifications are studied.

What hasn’t been forthcoming, says the chief, is support from Canada’s federal government, which has constitutional jurisdiction over First Nations affairs. Chief Redsky says he’s still waiting for a substantive reply to a letter sent in January to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Some members of his community, he says, are tired of waiting for Ottawa or some other government to resolve their grievances. With an eye to the recent Idle No More protests and hunger strikes, they’re looking to take matters into their own hands.

“We’re at a point now in terms of our relationship with Canada. We’re at a crossroads where there’s a road to reconciliation and a road to confrontation. We prefer reconciliation, we prefer sharing our resources, consultation, as promised in our treaties,” Chief Redsky says, leaving it clear - if unsaid - that confrontation cannot be ruled out.

Source

Venezuelan indigenous Yukpa leader Sabino Romero assassinated
March 6, 2013 

Indigenous Yupka chief and land rights activist Sabino Romero has been assassinated in an act which has generated public repudiation from social movements and the Venezuelan government alike. A high profile investigation into the killing has been launched.

Romero was a chief of the indigenous Yupka people of the Sierra de Perijá in western Venezuela. He was assassinated on Sunday night as he made his way to vote in an indigenous election, in circumstances which are still unknown.

Romero was a leader in the struggle for ancestral Yupka lands in the Sierra de Perijá, lands held by cattle ranchers, but many of which have been formally granted to the Yupka by the Chavez government.

Last November, Romero travelled to Caracas with some 60 Yupka to demand that the government act against violence on the part of cattle ranchers who were refusing to give up their lands, as well as to protest against government inaction and public media silence over the conflict.

Several Yupka have already been killed in the land rights dispute, including Romero’s own father, and activists say that local judicial impunity has prevented the murderers from being brought to justice.

The Venezuelan government today condemned Romero’s assassination as a “terrible act”, and announced that a high-profile investigation into the killing had already been launched. The government, in a statement, said it suspects that the Yukpa chief was murdered for his role in the land rights conflict with cattle ranchers.

“We can’t get ahead of ourselves on a hypothesis about  this act, which is condemnable and must be repudiated from all points of view, but in general the just struggle for the fair distribution of land is on the table [as a possible motive],” said communication minister Ernesto Villegas.

Indigenous groups and social movements held a protest today outside the Public Attorney’s office in Caracas to demand that those responsible for Romero’s assassination be brought to justice.

Source